Newsom's Housing Working Group Won't Work

by , 2004-04-08

Mayor Newsom's recently announced Housing Bond Working Group is rather odd. The 16-member group excludes any representatives of tenants rights organizations, even though many tenants will pay higher rents to cover part of the cost of the bond. Nor is a member of the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods on the panel, even though its 40+ groups have concerns about the proposed bond that must be addressed.

While key constituency groups have been ignored, backers of Prop J-which lost 70-30 in March-are well represented. The panel includes Prop J author Roberta Achtenberg, and such Prop J proponents as developer Oz Ericson of the Emerald Fund and Lawrence Wong (who claimed at the Task Force's first meeting that Prop J was a good idea that was misrepresented by opponents). It also includes Oscar DeLa Torre of the Laborers Union (the Building Trades campaigned heavily for Prop J), Melanie Piendak of the San Francisco Archdiocese (which sent a mailing to all parishioners urging them to vote Yes on J), and Jim Fabris of the pro-J Board of Realtors.

To our knowledge,Brad Paul is the only panel member who openly opposed Prop J. While there are some very good appointees(such as Dianne Spaulding of the Non-Profit Housing Assn, Maryann Leshin of the Corporation of Supportive Housing, and Jeff Kositsky of the Community Housing Partnership), the community-based nonprofit housers with the strongest constituency bases-Mission Housing, Bernal, and CCDC-are not included on the panel.

This is not a receipe for success in building the citywide consensus necessary to get 2/3 support for an affordable housing bond in November.

Instead, it looks as if the Chamber of Commerce sees the housing bond as a new strategy for enacting the heart of Prop J, which is the obtaining of public subsidies to house new upper-income residents.

The Board of Supervisors should begin its own housing bond planning process, and be willing to put a competing-and more politically popular-affordable housing bond measure on the ballot.